


RED STAR: Bucky Barnes talks new album, new life and a small tidbit about his new love.

by StrawberryLane



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Celebrity, Background Relationships, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Interviews, M/M, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Press and Tabloids, Rehabilitation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-06 01:56:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13401015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrawberryLane/pseuds/StrawberryLane
Summary: Take it from someone who knows. Former bad boy popstar Bucky Barnes is doing better than ever.





	RED STAR: Bucky Barnes talks new album, new life and a small tidbit about his new love.

**Author's Note:**

> Very much inspired by Taylor Swift and her new album. (It's so good?!?!?!)
> 
> Especially Delicate and Call it what you want.

Bucky Barnes has built up a reputation for being an almost too nice and charming interviewee over the years – OK’s Lindsay Thomas called him ‘womanizer and your mama’s dream all rolled into one’ in last year’s big spread. 

Sitting across from the musician at the Green Bakery Café in his native Brooklyn, New York, I can confirm the niceness – the man is so nice and charming it’s almost unnerving. He’s on time (early, even), makes polite small talk and seems genuinely interested in knowing about me. I tell him we’re here to talk about him and he laughs and tells me he’s ‘so fucking bored of talking ‘bout myself.”

Barnes tells me about his new album, ‘’Red Star’’ with almost childlike excitement – he may be bored of talking about himself, but his lyrics are a whole other matter. Red Star, his third album, has already reached number one in several countries and the lead single – With or without you – has been firmly in the number one spot since its release in late November. 

The popularity of the song may have something to do with the fact that the subject – Barnes’ on and off again girlfriend and ex-wife, New York City Ballet’s principal ballerina Natasha Romanoff – has been featured heavily in the media because of her surprise engagement to Tony Stark’s head of security, Clint Barton. 

“I wish her all the happiness,” Barnes tells me as he munches on a sugar free, gluten free donut and sips on a matcha latte. The Green Bakery Café is what one would call a hipster joint – a title the company seems to encourage. The cozy little space is full of college age people, drinking obscurely named coffee and tea drinks and reading heavy books like Crime and Punishment.

“Nat and I have been through so much – we’re high school sweethearts, believe it or not – and we will always be part of each others lives, whether that’s romantic or not. She and I are for life and we both know it.”

But it must hurt a little to see your ex move on so quickly and so publicly? 

“Well,” says Barnes, sipping on his drink and motioning for me to take a sip of my own Peppermint with strawberry fusion tea. It’s called a Castle on the Rocks, for reasons known only to the creator. “I was hurting when I wrote With or without you,” and she knows that perfectly well. But that song was written months ago. If you really wanna know where I’m at in life right now, you should take a listen to the last three songs on the album.”

The last three songs on Red Star are, in order: New York, Signs and Dear Darlin’.

While ‘New York’ is a love song to the city of the same name, ‘Signs’ and ‘Dear Darlin’ are both pure, I’ve-found-true-love type of songs., containing lyrics such as ‘Darlin, you and I forevermore,’,‘I’m stronger than I ever thought, your love has made me new’ and ‘’this love is golden to me, tell me you feel it too?”   
‘  
It’s interesting to note that whenever Barnes has written about love before, he’s always referred to it as a ‘red state of mind.’ “To me, love is bright red,” he said of his breakout single, ‘Anything.’ It’s been almost ten years – and three albums – since the single. I wonder if anything’s changed?

“Aside from the obvious,” Barnes giggles, holding up his left, now bare hand for me to see, “not much. But I guess I see love in a different way now, like it’s more settled. With Natasha it was always full on, we never really took a break, so to speak. I know how to do that now, how to just get home and veg out on the couch. I don’t need to be moving all the time, have no need to be surrounded by people, parties and glamor all the time. Life is still worth living and very exciting, it’s just that I’m not falling out of clubs at all hours of the night now.”

Barnes stopped, as he puts it ‘falling out of clubs’ about roughly two years ago, when he suddenly disappeared from the public eye, committing himself to a six month stint at rehab and a complete revamp of his image. Gone is the trashy, permanently exhausted looking Bucky Barnes, who sang about love, drugs and his love for said drugs almost excessively. In his place – a transformation he sang about in ‘ Born Again’ - is a prim and proper Barnes who still sings about love, but this time it’s the romantic, domestic kind and not about how he and his baby are gonna ‘stay up all night and get high on the couch.’

He’s been coy about what made him realize he needed rehab. “I’ve had people tell me for years that if I didn’t commit to recovery, it would all go to hell. My refusal to stay at a facility has been behind a lot of my breaks with Natasha. She always said she wouldn’t just stand there and watch me slowly kill myself and if I wanted to do that, then that was on me and not her. And she was right. I used to resent her for leaving me when I needed her, but I realize now that she left for her own well-being. She needed to take care of herself first, just like everybody else does too.”

So what made him actually commit to rehab?

Barnes chuckles darkly. The sound is in stark contrast to the image of the man in front of me; Barnes looks better than he honestly has in years. He looks healthy and fit, dressed in a smart suit, munching on the last of his sugar and gluten free donut. “Pierce, actually,” he says, referring to his former manager, Alexander Pierce. Pierce, who managed Barnes’ career for almost eight years, found himself in trouble shortly after the release of Barnes’ sophomore album, ‘Fallen Soldier’. Having had enough of her boyfriend’s pain, Natasha Romanoff took it upon herself to reveal evidence of the years’ worth of abuse and molestion Barnes had suffered from at the hands of his manager. “I thought I owed him. He gave me my career, so what if what he asked for in return was seriously wrong and creepy?” Barnes said of the scandal at the time.

“Firing Pierce made me realize I had a life, that I had people who cared about me, people who didn’t just like my music, but actually cared about my well-being. It made me realize that I wanted to live. So I entered a remote rehab facility in upstate New York and stayed for the entire six month program. Best thing I’ve ever done.”

Let’s get back to the point of this little meeting, I say. Those last three songs on the album, any chance I can get a hint about who exactly they’re about?

Barnes giggles again, his eyes sparkling. “His name is Steve,” he tells me, “And we’ve been together for over a year.”

Wow. Did Bucky Barnes, womanizer extraordinaire, just come out to me?

He shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. But don’t feel special, HollywoodInk has been telling everybody I’m as gay as a doorknob for years.”

That doesn’t make any sense, I say. Barnes shrugs again. “Neither does HollywoodInk most of the time. And I’m bisexual, actually. Just clarifying that, before any other tabloids gets wind of this and start running stories about how Natasha was just beard for over ten years of our lives. I was very much in love with her for most of our relationship.”

But not all of it?

“Not in the end, no. Then it was more like a best friend type of situation. Like, I loved her, but I wasn't in love with her.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading and I hope you liked it!


End file.
